It Doesn’t Look That Summery: Neverwinter’s Latest Trailer

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There’s eventually some nice in-game footage of the combat in Neverwinter in the new trailer, revealed via PAX this weekend. The game is set for release early next year, but in the meantime you can find out more about skull-faced pirate, Blackdagger, below.

I’m saddened that in four years or so what people are going to associate with the word “Neverwinter” will be this cack and not the rather brilliant (if flawed) Neverwinter Nights. Assuming they even remember this game at all, that is.

I’m saddened that so many people have spent the last four (or more) years developing MMO’s, both free-to-play and subscription-based, that seemingly very few care about.

Imagine all those resources being used on single-player titles instead… We could have had a new Knights of the Old Republic, a new Neverwinter Nights, a new The Longest Journey…. or a number of new solid IP’s.

Maybe I’m in a minority thinking like this since I’ve never really played MMO’s myself, but it really bums me out.

Yeah, I meant all the time spent by any developer on MMO’s in recent years. Sure there’s a market there and lots of people want to pay for and play this kind of game, but it just seems like too many are trying too hard and very few are succeeding.

I don’t want MMO’s to go away, I just want fewer companies to risk their entire business on a type of game that needs a huge base of players over a very long period of time.

I honestly thought that looked much prettier. The combat looked just as wonky as Dark Souls though.

I’m really trying to get into it, but after a couple of hours in the world and universe is incredibly generic and dull. But sod that, it’s about the fighting, or so they say. So far it’s like a poor man’s Witcher 2. The combat is nowhere near as good, or as difficult and it doesn’t have an interesting world and story like W2.

My main cause of death in Darks Souls so far is walking through a door and there being a hole right behind it which I fall through and die. And people are praising this? Madness.

I haven’t had that issue. I think I fell down an unexpected hole maybe 5 times. 3 of which were into dungeons or some sort of area with a mob, and the others were to my death. I fell like Dark Souls doesn’t smack you in the head with it’s graphics but it’s consistently excellent and creative. I really enjoyed the variety of creatures / bosses and the different feel of each type of weapon. Having just started NG+ I feel a lot of ownership for that game. I worked hard and learned a lot to beat it. Even though there wasn’t a map, I could trace routes to pretty much every location in the game. Anyway I’m rambling, but while challenging and frustrating, I feel like this game was probably one of the most naturally rewarding games I’ve played in years and the story telling while maybe a little too minimalist also made you notice every scrap because of it’s scarcity. Will definitely be in my top 5 games for a very long time.

Seriously though, that looked very, very poor on almost all fronts: bland character design, boring environments, dodgy animations, dated combat, the list goes on. That it’s being released next year is fairly shocking. They will need a tremendous gameplay hook to do well because it doesn’t seem to have much else in its favor.

I really wish they’d just make tabletop DnD on the computer with flashy graphics, that’s literally all it needs to be.

Neverwinter Nights was great in the sense the toolkit enabled people to create game sessions in this way but it was rather complicated to do so. In that way it was to DnD RPGs what ARMA is to mil-sim, hugely rewarding if you put the tremendous amount of time and effort required into it, but otherwise rather useless.

A streamlined approach to make it easier to create, host and play in a straightforward manner would be a blessing.

Of course it could still have a complex toolkit for the more technically able as well, but for it to really take off it needs to be more accessible to everyone.

It certainly doesn’t have flashy graphics, but Maptools is tabletop D&D on the PC. I think you’ll find that as a system gets simpler, it also has far more limitations. I wouldn’t have done things quite the way NWN did, but it wasn’t that poorly designed.

This is a pretty bad video for the Neverwinter MMO. It wasn’t even showing the UI or anything. This video helps, link to youtube.com but I think most of your opinions are already concrete. Ignore the talking, like I did, and just watch the gameplay.